Imperial Cities: The Tsarist Empire, the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire in Comparison

Urban history research has recently experienced increasing interest in “imperial” questions. One expression that is used over and over again is the “imperial city”. While this term has so far primarily been applied to the European metropolises of the western colonial empires, this conference aims to analyze the phenomenon of the imperial city in the context of the continental empires of Eastern Europe, such as the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire. Since these empires do not draw a clear distinction between “colony” and “motherland”, we suggest therefore that “imperial cities” can be understood as particular cities where empire manifests itself, which are also marked by the imperial form of the state. This conference analyses traces of Empire not only in the metropolises of Vienna, Istanbul or St. Petersburg, but also in provincial cities like Kazan, Zagreb or Salonika.